Christian (aka Dome) is an artist who has a studio is next door to the lightGIANTS studio so we run into each other all the time. A few weeks back we organises to shoot a large part of his current work. As this shoot was something completely different my normal portrait shoots I thought it would be interesting to post mostly “making of” style photos so you can see the process and thought that went into the shoot. To see the finished images please visit Christian (aka Dome) website www.domeone.de or visit him on Facebook www.facebook.com/dome.streetart
Large polystyrene reflectors on the sides for soft even light reflection, was not always easy depending on the size of the canvas.
Some of the things I took into consideration when planning the shoot
- White balance has to be perfect
- Colour reproduction 100% true
- Lens (barrel) distortion will have to be corrected
- Even light spread to avoid vignette
- Neutral fall of shadows
Sorry for the Cell phone quality images 🙂
Instead of standing the paintings in the studio I lay them on the ground, put my camera on a boom arm and shot tethered directly to lightroom. The paintings were flooded in soft light via soft-box umbrellas or shoot through umbrellas with large polystyrene blocks at opposite sides to get the lighting as even as possible.
Most of the shoot was taken up with rearranging the paintings, as I only to 2 or 3 photos of each painting as they lay there. Once each painting was shot I would
- Set the white balance based on the polystyrene sides
- Proof the sharpness and contrast
- Check for hotspots (reflection from the flash) in the black ink
- Crop the image and check for Vignette
To complicate things there were a variate of sizes shapes and forms to shoot including some 3d work that needed a lot more shadows then the paintings to captured the depth. Or works that took a while to remove the glass, all in all it was a long shoot but well worth the effort. Pleas remember none of these are finished photos but all parts of the “making of” process to show the difficulties in involved in something completely different.
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